Portrait No. 001
Michelle Oh
Co-Founder & GM
Roll AI
Raised — Currently in a raise
Video is everywhere - integrated into how we communicate, market, and share ideas. Yet while demand has exploded, the barriers to creating professional-quality videos remain impossibly high. The production process is stuck in decades-old manual workflows requiring expensive equipment and specialized knowledge that most people and businesses simply don’t have access to. The turning point was recognizing that these barriers weren’t creative, they were technical. And those technical barriers could finally be solved with AI. We started Roll because we believe world-class video production should be accessible to anyone with a story to tell and a phone in their pocket. Our founding team brought together deep expertise in enterprise SaaS, visual effects, and video technology - everything needed to rebuild the entire production stack from scratch. Why now? Because we’re at the inflection point where AI, cloud computing, and mobile technology can finally deliver on that promise - democratizing professional video production to make high-quality content accessible to everyone.
In her words
“AI has fundamentally changed the way we learn, create, and work. Never before has it been so possible to solve really hard and complex problems. It's an incredible time to build.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
I always told myself I’d never be a founder. Having been on early teams at two startups before, I knew the personal sacrifice founders make. And yet, here we are. It took the right team, technology, and mission for me to go all-in. But growing a startup while raising two young kids requires brutal prioritization and leaning on the support of my amazing husband and community. There’s no “hustle culture” glorification here - just making hard choices about where my time and energy go, and an inordinate number of all-nighters that I haven’t pulled since college. As a woman in tech and AI - both still male-dominated fields - I’ve had to navigate rooms where I’m often the only woman at the table. But our team has built groundbreaking technology that wows anyone we talk to and we have the wins to prove it. In just two short years, Roll has powered over 50,000 videos and counting, for creators, startups, the biggest companies in the world, and industry-leading events like CES, SXSW, Tech Week, and Cannes Lions. We’ve built technology that actually delivers on AI’s promise: faster, cheaper, better. The founder’s sacrifice is still very real. The constant and hard choice between time with my kids and time with customers never gets easier. But what keeps me going is seeing seasoned video professionals, people who’ve dedicated decades to this craft, react to what our technology can do. We’re not just building a product. We’re transforming an entire industry.
Chapter II
Your vision.
We want to make professional video production as accessible as Canva made design. Canva didn’t just transform a market - it created one. It made the pie bigger by giving everyone the right tools to be a designer. That’s what Roll is doing for video. We’re unlocking a world where any creator or business can produce professional video in hours that would traditionally take a production team weeks to deliver. Where a startup can produce customer testimonials that would’ve otherwise required a $50K budget. Where enterprise teams can finally scale video content to match demand on a timeline that enables their brand to stay relevant. This is what AI should actually enable - saving real businesses real time and real money, while unlocking use cases that simply weren’t possible before. The change we’re enabling isn’t just better video. We’re fundamentally changing what content gets created and whose voices get amplified. We’re making the pie bigger.
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
30 years from now, I want Roll to have fundamentally changed how video is made - proving that the barrier to great professional storytelling was never talent or creativity but access to the right tools. As a female co-founder without a CS or eng degree, I want to prove there’s no “right” path to building transformative technology. Don’t let your gender, education, or unconventional background limit what you think is possible. I hope my journey inspires women who don’t fit the traditional “tech founder” mold to build anyway. We need more diverse voices building the future.